Archinect - News

Antoni Gaudí’s Casa Batlló overlaid with AI-informed artwork by Sofia Crespo

2024-01-30T11:46:00-05:00

Antoni Gaudí’s Casa Batlló in Barcelona has served as the host for a major projection mapping artwork by Sofia Crespo over the weekend. Titled Structures of Being, the event drew 95,000 visitors across its showing on January 27th and 28th.

Image credit: Claudia Maurino

Created by Crespo with music by Robert M. Thomas, the project is described by organizers as “a spectacular setting that immersed the public in the nature contained inside Casa Batlló as well as in Gaudí's creative universe.” Created with the aid of artificial intelligence and the Barcelona Supercomputer Center, the project used data on the behavior of marine currents.

Image credit: Claudia Maurino

The artwork draws on Crespo’s interest in the boundaries of human perception in addition to her research into Gaudí’s own sources of inspiration. The resulting methodology saw Crespo use artificial neural networks to extract visual patterns from data inspired by the bra...

Iconic Parisian cathedral transformed into ‘sensory nighttime exploration’ by multimedia company Moment Factory

2023-10-26T12:53:00-04:00

Montreal-based Moment Factory has completed an immersive multimedia experience inside the iconic Dôme des Invalides in Paris. The project, titled 'AURA Invalides,' consists of a 50-minute experience combining video mapping, lighting, special effects, orchestral music, and sound design to celebrate the building’s architectural and historical heritage.

Image credit: Moment Factory

Conceived in 2019 by cultural operator Cultival in collaboration with Musée de l’Armée, the project seeks to create a “sensory nighttime exploration” in which visitors wander through the Dôme des Invalides and its six chapels guided by light. The experience is divided into three acts, each portraying a distinct facet of the site: “its construction, the memories it harbors, and its power to inspire one and all.”

Image credit: Moment Factory

To project an experience onto the main dome, which measures 295 feet high and 98 feet at its smallest diameter, the t...

Refik Anadol to cover Walt Disney Concert Hall with vivid data projections

2018-09-13T15:42:00-04:00

One of the most recognizable buildings in Downtown Los Angeles—the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall—will be used as a canvas later this month. To celebrate the start of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s new season, colorful patterns will be projected onto the metallic surface of the wavy concert hall for a little more than a week, courtesy of artist Refik Anadol.

For the LA Philharmonic projection series, called WDCH Dreams, internationally renowned media artist Refik Anadol dug deep in the digital orchestra archives—nearly 45 terabytes of data—and applied Google Arts and Culture's machine intelligence to it, which parsed the files into millions of data points that were then re-categorized and, with the help of deep neural networks, made new connections between LA Phil's "memories." According to Anadol, this process awakes the metaphorical "consciousness" of Walt Disney Concert Hall, and the result is a "radical visualization of the organization’s first century and an exploration of synergies between art and technology, and architecture and institutional memory."

WDCH Dreams, renderings by Refik Anadol Studio

To visualize the result of this process, Anadol will be using 42 large scale projectors, with 50K visual resolution, 8-channel sound, and 1.2M luminance in total, which should create quite a spectacular display on the stainless-steel fac...

Thinking with a box, to think outside the box.

2017-12-07T14:50:00-05:00

FreelandBuck has recently completed an 8,000-square-foot (or square-cubed) office interior/exterior for Hungry Man Productions headquarters in Los Angeles. Hungry Man asked FreelandBuck to potentially think outside the box and evaluate the traditional organization of an office. The result being a design just as playful and inviting as Hungry Man's own identity.

Drawing by FreelandBuck

The parti of the project creates a composition party of stacked, unstable cubes and playfully composes them through informal arrangements creating a diversity of stable and flexible working configurations while maintaining the scalelessness of discovery and fragility. Feigning randomness, the cubicles are calibrated to support specific relationships between staff while leaving adjacent breakout spaces open and flexible.

In addition, cubicle boxes pile up to make visually prominent display and projection areas that take full advantage of the generous ceiling height of the warehouse shell.

Photos by E...

The LOT: LAVA — Screens & Streets

2017-11-17T14:47:00-05:00

During LA CoMotion — a downtown event featuring the so-called city of tomorrow — a Los Angeles artist group is reframing what the city of tomorrow is by bringing the art to the screens and streets.

A local group of Los Angeles video artists is making strides — and having fun while doing it — with guerilla-style pops around the city on its endless canvases and spaces. Founded in 2003, LAVA is a community of artists working primarily in the field of immersive experiential video art. The goal of the LAVA community is to promote and nurture the movement of video art with the latest technological magic in the greater Los Angeles area.

LAVA members are constantly contributing to the current discourse around LED pixel mapping, 360 dome visuals, 3D and 4D projection mapping, interactive and immersive experiences, audiovisual software and hardware customization, content consciousness, ethics, and best practices.

Through...

Singapore's Marina Bay Sands gets a spiffy state-of-the-art laser and water show

2017-06-01T14:05:00-04:00

Marina Bay Sands is set to unveil ‘Spectra’, a new entertainment experience with state-of-the-art light and water show in June. The city skyline will glimmer with a kaleidoscope of colours and lights each night with Spectra’s free-to-public outdoor light and water show displayed over the water at the Event Plaza along the promenade. Combining an array of state-of-the-art lasers, lighting, water effects and projections, the show promises to be a multimedia extravaganza [...].

"The show will also boast specially developed underwater LED fixtures that allow lights to show perfect whites and richer colour hues. Other state-of-the-art technology used in Spectra include a synchronisation software called timecode, which enables the soundtrack to trigger, down to the millisecond, all of the lasers, lighting, projections and water effects in harmony each time."

h/t CTBUH

"Box" by Bot & Dolly explores the synthesis of real and digital space through projection-mapping on moving surfaces.

2013-09-24T20:44:00-04:00

The short film documents a live performance, captured entirely in camera. Bot & Dolly produced this work to serve as both an artistic statement and technical demonstration. It is the culmination of multiple technologies, including large scale robotics, projection mapping, and software engineering. We believe this methodology has tremendous potential to radically transform theatrical presentations, and define new genres of expression.